The New Features Of Mesa 10.3

Mesa 10.3 is gearing up for its official release in the weeks ahead and with the code having already been branched here's a rundown of the many new features.

Mesa 10.3 represents about three months of development work and is nearing completion with its OpenGL 4.0 support, but that wasn't completed in time to mark bumping the version number to Mesa 11.0. Of the Mesa 10.3 highlights include:

- Radeon H.264 video encoding support using the VCE engine on the latest AMD GPUs and implemented by the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver and the encode interface is exposed using the new OpenMAX Gallium3D state tracker.

- Good support for AMD Hawaii GPUs for those not wanting to use the high-performance Catalyst driver.

- Nouveau support for Tegra K1 graphics / GK20A. This work was done by NVIDIA to provide support for the Kepler-based "GK20A" graphics processor in Mesa and there's also the DRM driver work contributed by NVIDIA Corp for this high-performance ARM SoC.

- The new Broadcom VC4 Gallium3D driver developed by Eric Anholt. The VC4 Gallium3D driver is still a work-in-progress along with the new DRM driver, but is making good progress and supports the Raspberry Pi on a fully open-source GPU driver.

- GLX_MESA_query_renderer -- a GLX extension designed by Mesa developers and targeting game developers -- finally is working for non-Intel drivers.

- Various performance optimizations.

- There's also a new software rasterizer driver (kms_swrast_dri) that works with DRM drivers that lack a full GEM memory management implementation, like QXL or SimpleDRM.

We've already delivered many Mesa 10.3 performance tests using the Intel, Radeon, and Nouveau drivers while more benchmarks are still forthcoming. Any other Mesa 10.3 changes we missed or features you wish were added? Let us know in the forums.

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the web-site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience and being the largest web-site devoted to Linux hardware reviews, particularly for products relevant to Linux gamers and enthusiasts but also commonly reviewing servers/workstations and embedded Linux devices. Michael has written more than 10,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics hardware drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated testing software. He can be followed via Twitter and Google+ or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.